Consumers of telecommunications services are constantly demanding new and more advanced services to facilitate their personal communications. Examples of such services are free phone (FPH) services such as time dependent routing, calling card (CCD) services, virtual private network (VPN) services and personal 1-800 services. Information associated with these services such as telephone and calling card numbers is typically stored in one or more databases.
Advanced telecommunications systems often include a service control point (SCP) that contains the databases. The service control point accesses the databases to provide routing and other information for the advanced services demanded by telephone users. For example, a service switching point (SSP) may transmit a dialed 1-800 number to the service control point to receive the actual routing number associated with the dialed 1-800 number. The actual routing number may vary depending on, for example, the time the dialed 1-800 number call was placed or the originating location of the dialed 1-800 number. A database in the service control point is accessed with the dialed 1-800 number, and information associated with the 1-800 number and an appropriate routing number is selected from the database for transmission back to the service switching point.
A customer of a telecommunications system such as, for example, MCI, Sprint, AT&T, or GTE, typically provision the databases at the service control point. Examples of provisioning the databases include adding subscriber names and information to the databases, deleting subscriber names and information from the databases and updating current entries to reflect changes in data associated with a subscriber.
Conventional methods for provisioning databases suffer several disadvantages. For example, databases in each service control point are provisioned by a local interface residing in the service control point. As a result, provisioning operations must be separately initiated on each service control point.